


Discordance

by tortuosity



Series: Intertwined [2]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Angst, Break Up, Character Study, Cheating, F/F, F/M, Hate Sex, Past Relationship(s), Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-05
Updated: 2020-03-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:34:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23021041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tortuosity/pseuds/tortuosity
Summary: A juxtaposition of Isabela and Hawke's first loves.
Relationships: Female Hawke/Original Female Character(s), Isabela/Other(s)
Series: Intertwined [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1654558
Comments: 10
Kudos: 12





	Discordance

**Author's Note:**

> Recommended listening: Taeyeon - “Time Lapse”  
> 그래 사랑이란 게 다 그런 거지 뭐 (Yes, that’s how love is)  
> 항상 시작과 끝은 달라도 너무 다르고 (The beginning and the end are always so different)

**9:21 Dragon**

Isabela doesn’t know she's in love until Aiden says it first. He’s still inside her when the words slip out, a breathless murmur against her cheek, hiding between grunts and gasps. Caught in the moment, mind erased, she almost misses it, but when he’s finished, she asks. She shouldn’t. She should just let it go, but she asks.

“What did you say?”

His head comes off the pillow. A man moments ago but now a boy, rosy-cheeked and bashful. Too shy to look at her, hiding behind an untamed mop of dirty blonde hair. He bites his lip.

Maybe he’s ashamed, she thinks, the same thought that’s wormed its way into her brain since the first night she let him follow her home, a Marcher puppy trotting at her heels. Maybe he’s finally realized the mistake he’s made in staying with her, a girl ripped into a woman, stretched too thin to hold his affections.

But, no. He runs a hand through his hair, and she knows he wants her to look at him, but she won’t, she can’t. She stares at the dust motes dancing near the ceiling instead.

“I said, ‘I love you.’”

Can’t pretend it didn’t happen now. He’s watching her and expecting a response, a fulfilment of some childhood fantasy, fairytales she’s long learned not to believe in. 

But he’s kind. Maker, he’s so kind. Maybe she can try.

“I… I love you, too.”

The words feel awkward in her mouth and they come out in a stammer, like the first time she tried speaking Antivan. At least these words are of her own volition, not forced from her lips in some cruel, pointless display of power. These words are in the King’s Tongue, the only language she shares with Aiden, but they will do. It offers her a disconnection, one he can’t understand, not with only his mother tongue to his name. She could not bring herself to say these words in Rivaini, and the thought of saying them in Antivan makes hatred surge up the back of her throat. Never again.

No, she will say them in the language of commerce.

She sees him smiling—no, _beaming_ —from the corner of her eye, and that should be enough for her, shouldn’t it? She smiles back and hopes love is like a new pair of boots, that the discomfort will fade with time. 

—

**9:28 Dragon**

Hawke knows she’s in love from their first kiss. That must be what this feeling is, the one filling her head with dandelion fluff and her chest with sunshine, exhilarating and wild and terrifying. But she’s not stupid. She’s not about to scare Brianne off with such girlish nonsense.

So she vows to keep it to herself, but it’s bloody difficult with Brianne looking at her like that, like she would make the sun rise and set for Hawke alone. Or maybe that’s just the butterflies talking. Doesn’t matter.

“That was nice,” Brianne says, then a giggle bursts from her before she has time to stop it. It’s rare, hearing Brianne laugh, and Hawke longs to bottle the sound of it.

Small miracle she could meet a girl in _Lothering_ , of all places. Well, that isn’t quite true. She had met girls before. There was Clara, of course, back when Father was still alive, before Hawke took his name for her own—her one quiet rebellion. Clara had dark eyes and darker hair and always smelled like hay and horses. They shared messy, clandestine kisses in her parents’ barn, then more than kisses. But that was a summer romance, a fragile dalliance, just like all the ones that came after.

“Are you sure?” Hawke teases. Her face aches from grinning. “Better do it some more, just to check.”

Brianne laughs again, thank the Maker, and pulls Hawke back for another kiss, less hesitant than before. Her hands slide inside Hawke’s coat, wandering, and Hawke doesn’t stop them. She’d like to think she can take it slow, do things right this time. But love is such a persuasive intoxicant, and Hawke is lost in its thrall. If Brianne asks…

But she doesn’t. They part, and Brianne is the serious soldier once more, studying Hawke’s face so intently it seems like her eyes will tear every secret out of her, strip away the mile-high walls Hawke has carefully erected since Father’s death, bit by bit, until there’s nothing left but Marian. 

And maybe Hawke will let her.

No more midsummer flings, she decides; this one will be different. It’s winter in Ferelden, when the color of the sky matches the color of the ground for weeks at a time, grey on grey, and the air’s so cold it burns. Brianne’s cheeks and nose are apple-red—and not just from the kissing—and snowflakes are starting to gather in her curls. Their breath floats between them in white clouds of frost. If love can blossom now, Hawke thinks, surely it’s meant to last. 

—

**9:22 Dragon**

“So much for love, hm?” Caleb drawls. His left hand clasps a bottle of rum while his right paws at her breast. “Never cared for the stuff myself.”

“Shut up,” Isabela hisses, but she continues unlacing his breeches. She hopes he can’t feel her fingers trembling.

He maneuvers the bottle over her head to take a swig. “What did my stupid baby brother do this time?”

“Shut your fucking mouth.”

Her lips crush against his in some desperate attempt to silence his pride and her guilt, and there’s the smallest spark of satisfaction when she shoves him against the wall hard enough to force the breath from his chest. Some of the rum splashes onto her arm; it’s all she can taste and all she can smell, smoke and molasses and growing up far too fast. Her stomach twists into knots even as she longs to jerk the bottle from his hand and down the whole thing.

It’s Aiden’s fault. Aiden with his big blue eyes looking up at her from down on one knee, that tiny fucking ring cradled in his palm like it was meant to save her. Like bait. 

Caleb sets the rum aside then shifts his weight to the balls of his feet and grips her waist tighter; she pulls him down to the floor before he can try to pin her against the wall. They can rut on the ground like animals. Appropriate.

That damned ring. A handful of red roses. Wine. Antiva City’s plazas hidden behind the boughs of a massive olive tree, its gnarled trunk wider than the dome atop the city’s main chantry. It was the place where they shared their first kiss. He really thought if he checked enough boxes he could convince her, didn’t he? 

She finally has the laces undone. Caleb’s fingers dig under the waistband of her pants, impatient. Batting his hands away, she yanks the pants off herself, and a flick of her foot sends them skittering across the floor to land somewhere near Aiden’s bedroom.

She told Aiden about Luis. Not about her sale or the specifics of her former husband’s death—those details are too sharp, too poisonous to ever leave her mouth—but he knows what happened within the ornate walls of that seaside _palazzo_. He knows about the threats, the isolation, the cabal of merchant friends dying for a taste of Luis’s new plaything. She told him, sobbing in his arms while he tried to soothe her—while he tried to be a better man than the one she left behind: the man with a knife in the back of his head, bleeding out on the bed where the last dregs of her childhood were torn away and left to rot.

 _You’re not broken_ , he said. But she was, she _is_ , and this proves it.

Caleb groans softly when she mounts him; she focuses on some spot on the wall above his head to avoid witnessing his self-satisfied smirk. _Your brother’s bigger_ , she wants to say. It would erase his infuriating smugness, but, somehow, ludicrously, the insult seems unnecessarily cruel. 

Why? Why would Aiden ask that of her? Was love not enough? Perhaps all men require ownership. But no; Aiden isn’t like that. He is gentle where other men are callous, yielding where other men are intractable. This was an expression of adoration as natural to him as breathing. This was a promise of stability to a woman who has never known solid ground.

 _I know I’ll never be able to give you everything you deserve, but…_

Isabela trails her fingers down Caleb’s throat, applying just enough pressure to widen his eyes. His pulse—his life—throbs under her thumb.

_I love you, Isabela. Would you marry me?_

That kind, sweet boy doesn’t even know her real name.

She thinks of him and his blue eyes and his gold ring while she fucks his brother. Maybe she was sweet and kind once, too, many years ago, but life always seems to have a way of stealing compassion and corrupting it into something hard and bitter, a sword turned against its owner. If it’s inevitable, it might be easier if she’s the one who does it.

Better to be stabbed in the back by a lover.

—

**9:30 Dragon**

In the few seconds between the hurlock’s last harried gasps and the wet thud of her blade sinking through its neck and into the dirt, Hawke realizes Brianne no longer loves her.

She’s not sure why that conclusion has decided to strike her now, at the edge of a swamp littered with corpses, but it does. The sword in her hands is suddenly unbearably heavy.

Brianne prowls among the bodies, giving each a tiny investigative tap with the toe of her boot or the point of her longsword. Blood spatters her armor; it collects in her chainmail in black, sticky clumps and smears across her face like a vile sort of kaddis.

Some of the fallen are not darkspawn. The ones with the most life left in them—the groaners, the twitchers—were carted off the field not long ago. But there are a few clinging to the edge of death, eyes closed, their breathing so slow and shallow Hawke can almost convince herself that they’re well and truly deceased as she steps over them.

She hopes Brianne is more merciful.

It’s surprising to even see her. Brianne was—as always—part of the initial force sent to fight back this incursion of darkspawn; Hawke was only sent in when the battle was nearly won. _Go clean up_ , her commanding officer told her. She was lucky enough to run her sword through a genlock before it was all over. But bards certainly won’t be singing tales of her exploits. Everyone knows why she joined the army. Or, rather, for whom.

Hawke watches Brianne kneel next to a man lying face down, avoiding the pool of blood leaching into the earth under his head while she flips him over onto his back. Not dead. Hawke waits for a reaction—a curse, a grimace, something. But Brianne is stone-faced as she pulls the knife from her belt. Her hands don’t shake. Hawke looks away.

“Their attacks are becoming more frequent,” Brianne says when she’s done. Her voice is flat, emotionless, like she’s observing the weather, like she didn’t just have to kill someone.

“You’d think they’d get the message by now, what with all the dead darkspawn we keep leaving around everywhere,” Hawke replies, and she wants to cringe at her own flippancy. 

Brianne doesn’t smile. She hasn’t smiled much lately, despite Hawke’s best efforts. It makes Hawke wonder if Brianne was always so grim, if maybe she’s been humoring Hawke this whole time. Brianne is close enough to touch, but the distance, the dissonance between them has slowly, almost imperceptibly, grown to something that now feels insurmountable. 

They haven’t kissed in weeks. 

_Do you still love me?_ Hawke can get her answer right here in a darkspawn graveyard, where only she and Brianne and the circling carrion birds can hear. Brianne has always been painfully honest; she will say it, if Hawke can swallow her fear long enough to ask.

Hawke takes a deep breath. The air reeks of dampness and death.

“Do you—”

“I’ve been assigned to King Cailan’s guard.” Brianne’s interruption comes out in a panicked rush, and her head drops, hiding her eyes beneath the shadow of her helmet.

Any response Hawke can think of evaporates on her tongue. This is what Brianne’s always wanted, the dreams they spoke of eons ago beneath the stars, but there’s no joy in her expression. When the silence stretches on for longer than she can stand, Brianne looks back up. Her eyes are empty, and Hawke imagines hers must be, too.

“That’s... good. I’m happy for you.” She’s not, not in the least. It doesn’t matter.

It should hurt more, shouldn’t it? Shouldn’t it feel like her heart is being torn in two? Shouldn’t she want to cry, or scream, or beg Brianne to stay? But there’s nothing left to fight for. 

This winter seems milder than usual. They’re far enough south; there should be snow, but the ground is bare and soft under her feet. Tufts of grass poke out of the dirt around the battlefield, flashes of green beneath the blood.

Brianne turns and walks away, leaving a swath of trampled wildflowers in her wake.


End file.
